In the early 2010s, the composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes, and Michael Hobe were working on music for Hollywood films like The Dark Knight when they found themselves deluged with requests for simple background music for film, TV or video games.

On one side of the spectrum, AI music has become an answer to a simple demand: more music is needed than ever, thanks to a ballooning number of content creators on streaming and social media platforms. Instead, much more intriguing progress is being made in two seemingly diametrically opposed streams of music: the functional and the experimental. Perhaps in part due to these limitations, few straight-ahead pop songs are being created by AI. Last year, the experimental singer-songwriter Holly Herndon received acclaim for Proto, an album in which she harmonized with an AI version of herself: In 2018, Francois Pachet, a longtime AI music pioneer, spearheaded the first pop album composed with artificial intelligence, Hello, World. Progress in AI music field has rapidly accelerated in the past few years, thanks in part to devoted research teams at universities, investments from major tech companies and machine learning conferences like NeurIPS. At the same time, a music theory professor trained a computer program to write new compositions in the style of Bach when an audience listened to its work next to a genuine Bach piece, they couldn’t tell them apart. In the 90s, David Bowie started playing around with a digital lyric randomizer for inspiration. Alan Turing, the godfather of computer science, built a machine in 1951 that generated three simple melodies. “It’s provided me a sense of relief and excitement that not everything has been done - that there’s a wide-open horizon of possibility,” Arca, a producer who’s worked with Kanye West and Björk on groundbreaking albums, told TIME in a phone interview.Īrtificial intelligence and music have long been intertwined. While obstacles like copyright complications and other hurdles have yet to be worked out, musicians working with AI hope that the technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation. Meanwhile, a host of musicians and researchers across the world are developing tools to make AI more accessible to artists everywhere.

Over the past several years, several prominent artists, like Arca, Holly Herndon and Toro y Moi have worked with AI in order to push their music in new and unexpected directions. Var doodlepage = new slashdoodles.But there are many musicians who feel that the onset of AI won’t end human art, but spur a new golden era of creativity.

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